


A Love Supreme: A Jazz Meditation on Empyrean Love

by Tammany



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Contempative., M/M, Meditation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 20:26:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19158367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: This WANTS to be read to Coltrane's "Love Supreme." Crowley is likely to get it. I suspect Aziraphale will when his tastes work their way up to real jazz. He's a bit behind the curve.This is not a "story." It's a meditation, a contemplation, an analysis, an evocation, a revelation, a torchy sort of attempt to see the relationship of angel and demon as romance and longing and desire--as hot as the heart of a burning sun--while retaining the notion that it could be entirely non-sexual. I am hoping to find the intensity of feeling and vulnerability and mutual awareness that equals sexuality without in any physical way mimicking it. I hope it works.





	A Love Supreme: A Jazz Meditation on Empyrean Love

The first thing you need to understand is that it is not sex.

They could have sex, just as they drink booze and eat crepes and wear human bodies and human clothes. The same way Aziraphale reads human books and Crowley plays with human technology. Sex is not an impossibility—indeed, given the option of changing shapes, they could enjoy more ways of having sex than any real humans ever could. Gender is only remotely part of who they are. Sexuality is for the most part a role they play, intrinsic to humans but only performed by angel and demon.

Someday maybe they will have sex, if it seems called for and appropriate. But if so, it will be a matter of playful exploration—a learned taste. A bit of novelty.

They are angel and demon, and sex as humans understand it simply doesn’t correlate to what they do or who they are.

But if you ask what they do, Aziraphale will blush and stutter and his nose will turn an amusing shade of pink. And Crowley will become suddenly surly and rude and suggest you’re obsessed and far too human and then he’ll go crashing off in full flounce to drive too fast and drink too much and mainly get a long way away from you and your nosy questions.

They are angel and demon, in love. A situation not previously recorded, and one they are learning about themselves.

Angels have lain with the “daughters of man.” But that was always a sex thing, something to do with angels being fascinated with the peculiar potential of their assigned bodies, handed out by the Quartermaster angels (Body, one, Cherubic capacity, gender: male, height 6’9”, pattern, human subpopulation Africa 7, serial number 9994815). So: angels fascinated with their gear, and “daughters of men” similarly intrigued by handsome men and women who are far too physically perfect and too socially straaaange. It has nothing to do with what occurs when the Lineage of the Empyrean love each other—angel or demon. Wherever that starts, however it ends, no matter what happens in time or in eternity, there is one key thing that distinguishes angels and demons in love.

Intimacy.

Say it like a blessing. Say it like a prayer. Say it like the weeping curse of the dying. Say it like the scream of a mother in labor. Say it like the sobs of a mourner at the grave. Say it with the gasp of a dawn orgasm. Say it with the agony of the death of your beloved. That just begins to touch on the intimacy of the Lineage of Empyrean when they are in love.

Crowley shivers, thinking of the intimacy between him and his lover. It makes him feel weak and vulnerable just imagining those moments when, standing in the same room, their souls overshadow each other, and the knowing pours from one to the other, invading every corner of each other’s self—when teasing fingers of spirit strum entire chords from the harp unstrung, and vision meets vision and two are one in ecstasy.

It happens, and the tone and mood of it lasts for hours after, leaving Crowley with an echoing hum that does what should be impossible. When he and Aziraphale are together in the way of the Lineage, when they have been together and the harp has played the melody that is just those two together, the very pain of damnation is gone from him.

That should be impossible. He is judged at least twice over by God herself: once for his fall with Lucifer; once for his temptation of Eve, when his serpent self was accursed for all time to crawl in the dust and to suffer at mankind’s heel. God’s judgment is normally like living impaled with two swords, that shift and ache and rip at him at all times. But the nearer he and Aziraphale are, the less he hurts, and when they are that special, angelic form of together, there is only beauty-terror-joy-grief-fear-hope-shyness, only the sense of being stripped and shown in far too much intimacy, only the sharing of tenderness and the panic of too much reality revealed.

When Aziraphale is with Crowley, in that special way, it’s like having his entire self cranked up to eleven—and then further still. They can be walking a London pavement, Crowley sauntering all cheeky and full of himself, the wicked trickster vibe dripping off every atom of his physical being, and every radiant particle of energy of his aetheric self, and Aziraphale can be trotting alongside, round and upright and righteous, feet scurrying to keep up with the taller demon—and at the same time he will be swept with the passionate intensity of their joining, and he will swoon with relief that no one can see it, or share it, or know it but he and his beloved, for it is too naked to endure without the privacy created when the wings of their two souls rise up and shield them from prying eyes.

Reality glows, when they are intimate. They can stand feet away from each other, and suffer the “little rapture,” when they are taken away from everything but their one shared Paradise—a paradise greater than the Garden and greater than God’s House, filled with many mansions.

Imagine whatever you need to understand. If you need the parable of sex, of hands on genitals and panting desire growing, and nakedness laid out helpless on the altar of love, then by all means: if that is how you can start to understand, let it be so. But for them, it is not so.

The first thing you need to understand is that it’s not about sex. It’s about intimacy—two divine souls stripped raw and brought together, all the pain and joy and hunger and need clear and detailed, and all the rewards of sharing made manifest, and all the ways that even perfect intimacy can leave you still lonely completely unhidden.

Work on it. Think about it. They know, to a perfect degree, how each completes the other. They know to an equally perfect degree, how each leaves the other alone and unsatisfied, crying in the midnight of their shared lovemaking. The climax and the fall are both there, naked as Adam and Eve, with not a single fig leaf to hide behind.

They are angel and demon, enjoying the epitome of love, for better or for worse.

How could sex even hope to compare?


End file.
